


grey merchant of asphodel

by hilarions



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 02:58:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14034672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hilarions/pseuds/hilarions
Summary: “This killer,” Hannibal’s voice crept beneath Will’s eyelids, “wrote you a poem.”Will didn’t need an avid imagination to see a monster. All he needed to do was open his eyes.“Are you going to let his love go to waste?”





	grey merchant of asphodel

**Author's Note:**

> hi im new here

Eyes closed, he pictured for himself a monster. 

In the living room of a run-down walk in apartment with dingy faded green carpet and the clutter of a life half-lived, Will saw for himself a centrepiece. A stag’s head, mounted artfully where anyone else might have had a coffee table. Mounted on that stag was a man. Antlers pierced through his body, blood burned black on the altar of its forked palm. The meat of his cheeks cut and cut and cut open to leave his jaw unhinged in death’s sardonic grin. An ear sliced from his head - in police custody, now. A tribute.

Admiration, perhaps. It was sickening. To Will Graham, at least. 

To the man he considered himself to be, standing before a clinically efficient summary of every crime Will was to be convicted of, it was satisfaction. Relief. A tribute to the legacy tied inexorably to Will’s name. 

It was not his legacy, and this was not the impetuous outrage of a man incensed at having perceived copyright reattributed for his art. It was not his signature. 

Swallowing back sour spit and the repugnant satisfaction of - of  _ handing an assignment in on time,  _ Will’s dry lips parted and his tongue flicked over them before he said, “It’s not the same killer.” A tight sigh, uncertain, trembling through the column of his throat, and Will placed the photograph back on the table. Swallowed again, forced a quick glance to catch the patient expectation on Hannibal’s face before looking away, shaking his head while he tried to find words to suit a wordless understanding. “He,” a vaguely helpless gesture, short and sharp, quickly aborted by the clattering reminder of a chain strung between his hands, locked into the table, “he murdered his victim first and  _ then  _ mutilated him.”

I would be wrong to presume Will had never tried to understand what Hannibal was beneath all that polish, all that pleasantry and poise. Vermeil veneer. Gold leaf. The problem, as he had often found, was that Hannibal somehow managed to defy every attempt Will made to understand him. Even in seeing him - even in  _ seeing  _ him, he couldn’t comprehend what made Hannibal drop his gaze, what made his lips twist and push as though he were fighting back some devastating disappointment. Some… failure. 

Will could not feel what might be lodged in Hannibal’s throat which he so painfully had to swallow back. 

“Cassy Boyle’s lungs were removed while she was still breathing,” he said, fingertips stuck to the glossy print of the photograph. “Georgia Madchen was burned alive,” he emphasised, eyes caught, attention caught on the uncharacteristic way Hannibal seemed completely unwilling to match his gaze. To outstare him until nervous paranoia rose up like bile in Will’s throat and forced him to look away. “What I-” he started, stumbled, “wh-” lost his voice, heart thrumming in his throat when he forced himself to say even in a whisper, “what I  _ found  _ of Abigail was… cut off while her heart was still beating.” Nausea and nerves made for uncertain emphasis, awkward intonation. 

“And this,” Hannibal concluded in his stead, let Will recapture his voice but kept his eyes low like he was just as nervous, somehow - like there was just as much breath-stealing adrenaline shuddering in his fingertips despite how his voice kept smooth when he finished, “is blunt reproduction.”

Will locked his jaw. Looked at Hannibal. Looked at him, and tried to  _ see  _ him. There was only one certainty that he could find in the coquettish shyness leadening his eyes to the table. The faintest tremor caught in his voice, because through all the reversedness of their conversation, Hannibal still succeeded in scaring him. “You knew that already.”

He refused, still, to meet Will’s demanding gaze. Eyes burning black fire. Lips moved, pushed. Shaped guilty words and wondered how to phrase them. “I’d like to have been wrong.”

Hannibal was not a man in the habit of deluding facts for the simple sake of peace of mind. He was not in the habit of believing anything but the totality of what was presented to him. A keenly proud mind, as much as it was clever, and he would never stand to let an enigma defeat him. Particularly not for something as frivolous as  _ hope.  _

That, at least, cut Will’s nerves. Jaw set, he tilted his chin. Locked Hannibal’s performative reluctance in place with a still heart and cold fire, hands curled into rebuking fists on the table before him. “You intentionally ignored facts that refute your argument,” he summarised, an unamused smile pinching at his lips, “hoping nobody would notice?”

He glanced up. Matched Will’s demands. An admission of guilt. “You noticed,” he reasoned. 

Will scoffed a sharp, unimpressed sound, and wondered if Hannibal really would turn out to be someone so disappointing, or if it was something else. Of course, there had to be something else. Because Hannibal, it seemed, was giving himself over to Will with admissions not admitted. Confessions inferred. 

He looked away again, for a long moment. Seemed to gather his thoughts or his pride, or perhaps shed what remained of his defence. When he glanced up, staunch, there was something foreign in his expression. “I wanted to dispel your doubts once and for all.” Caustic rarity dragged through his words, and Will wondered if that was what an attempt at honest honesty sounded like - cryptic though it may have been.

Cryptic though it may have been, but even as Will found himself shaping the sounds to ask, “My doubts about what?” something truly awful seemed to fall into place. 

Not a tribute. A gift, perhaps, or a letter, or an admission. 

Rather; an apology. 

“Me,” Hannibal said, polished voice chaffing in his throat. Eyes down, down, and flickering up to catch Will’s almost as though he couldn’t help his morbid curiosity but to peer into the face of his reckoning. “I want you to believe in the best of me,” he said, words catching on a whisper like he was saying something that dropped the floor from beneath his feet, because for so long he had lived in the dark, and though his mind was still a world of smoke and mirrors, his fingers seemed to tremble at turning on the light. “Just as I believe in the best of you.”

Hannibal swallowed like he wanted to cleanse himself of the lingering soil to his palate an admission like that left. Pursed his lips against the discomfort of vulnerability and reasoned with the affected cantor of someone planting unsubtle seeds, “This crime offered us both reasonable doubt.”

“It offered a distraction,” Will corrected, unflinching. Digging. Pickaxing the reluctant truth from Hannibal’s steel-clad grip, wavering and gone soft. 

He was too enamoured with aesthetics to suit steel, really, and his reluctance would have stood up to a lot more if it were. Not gold leaf at all. Twenty-four karats of a magpie’s treasures, relinquished unwillingly to reveal a secret he didn’t seem to have much inclination to keep locked away.

“Maybe this acolyte is giving you your path to freedom.” 

Third-person sincerity lapped over Will like a truth both unsurprising and unappetising. Light-headed with a thrill of vague nausea, he leaned back in his chair, hands pressed flat to the cold steel bench like he might be hoping that would be enough to ground him from a churning certainty he’d long since known.

Words fell blunt and thoughtless from a numb tongue when he said, “It would be a lie.”

Hannibal looked at Will, and something unwavering was back in him. Certainty. Pride. Shameless despite the carefully ambiguous way he admitted to doing what Will should have known he’d be capable of. Voice smoothed over like silk spread across asphalt, the jagged cut of his words framed honesty in a man who seemed to have long since forgotten what it was like to fold a winning hand. “I don’t want you to be in here.”

A rough laugh fell like an unsteady breath from Will’s nose, lips pressed tight. “I don’t want me to be in here either.”

A beat, and then another. Tempered silence. Will let his eyes slip closed, caving to Hannibal’s sharklike stare. “You have a choice.”

Cold smile pinching at cold lips. As much an expression of  _ no I don’t  _ as  _ praytell.  _

“This killer,” Hannibal’s voice crept beneath Will’s eyelids, “wrote you a poem.”

Will didn’t need an avid imagination to see a monster. All he needed to do was open his eyes. And if he were to open them, he knew he’d be seeing a black carapace as shiny in the dim light as a beetle’s, or as gunmetal. Antlers mounted on the brow of a featureless face. Black eyes, black lips, black heart - on the question of if he had one, there was no doubt. 

The devil was said to be a goat, but a stag too had cloven hooves. 

“Are you going to let his love go to waste?”

What a terrible thing it was to open his eyes to a devil who’d dropped his mask, and to find nothing but a plea for Will to save himself. And only at the cost of his immortal soul. 


End file.
